TAKE 500 SQUAWKING, grunting, snuffling animals, 13 hectares of Wellington land, and 170,000 visitors per year, and turn them

into a city asset, and profitable business. Not an easy task. Enter Karen Fifield, enthusiastic veteran of zoo management, and she’ll show us how it’s done.
After years managing Taronga and Western Plains zoo in Australia, she headed here in 2006 and after a brief stint with a local insurance company, she heard about the opening for CEO at the Wellington zoo, and grabbed the opportunity.

Karen’s been busy managing the recent change from Wellington City Council Business Unit to a Charitable Trust, which happened in 2003. “It was a really sensible thing to do” says Karen, “we can access so much more funding now than we could as a Wellington City Council business unit.” Now the zoo has a 10-year business plan, involving 21 million dollars. Seems like a lot, but not if you compare it to Melbourne and Victoria zoos which have planned 115 million over 10 years, or Taronga Zoo’s master plan which involves 365 million over 20 years. Wellington Zoo have raised a quarter of their capital development money themselves – that’s over five million dollars. They’ve also been able to come up with 44 per cent of this year’s operating costs; The remainder is given to them by WCC.
Wellington Zoo opened in 1906 with a single lion and a handful of staff. Since then it has housed hundreds of species, and now attracts almost half of all Wellingtonians each year.

Karen believes the boost in funding shows that the zoo is finally being invested in as an asset. “Before the change to a Trust, nothing had been done for years. It was hugely underinvested in terms of people, resources, and as an asset. It had no history of corporate sponsorship at all – and these relationships take years to build up.”

One relationship that proved itself worthwhile lately was that with Landcorp. Due to the recent droughts, the zoo began running out of hay, and weren’t sure they could get any more. They called on Landcorp, who promptly arrived with fresh hay and helped them out.

And then there’s Arataki Honey, who sponsors the zoo’s sunbear Sean, who was was rescued by Free the Bears from a grisly fate of becoming bearpaw soup in a Cambodian restaurant. Since then he has been the first from the programme to breed in captivity.